Tolkien and the Great War (29 page)

Now silent are those courts,

Ruined the towers, whose old shape slowly fades,

And no feet pass beneath their broken ports.

The sentiment echoes that of the Old English poem
The Wanderer,
in which ‘ealda enta geweorc idlu stodon', the old work of giants stood desolate. Like the Anglo-Saxon Wanderer, too, Eriol has been bereaved by an apocalyptic war. Orphaned and made captive, he heard somehow the distant call of the great sea and escaped through ‘wasted valleys and dead lands' to the western shores, arriving eventually in the Lonely Isle.

But that was long ago

And now the dark bays and unknown waves I know,

The twilight capes, the misty archipelago,

And all the perilous sounds and salt wastes ‘tween this isle

Of magic and the coasts I knew awhile.

The inhospitable, fogbound tip of Holderness seems to make its presence felt here at the end of Eriol's wanderings, while the sea, ever ambivalent, loses some of its lustre for him, much as it did for Tuor.

Tolkien found
1918 an ordeal
. As the new year came in and he turned twenty-six, he was feeling much stronger, but then the pace of recovery slowed down. Exercise still left him exhausted, and he looked weak. Two months later he was struck down by a bout of 'flu which confined him to his bed for five days, though this was before the terrible Spanish influenza epidemic that left millions dead across Europe in the latter half of the year.

But in March, medical officers at the Humber Garrison put an end to his treatment. The Royal Defence Corps was being wound down, and on Tuesday 19 March Tolkien was sent back for further ‘hardening' with the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers at Thirtle Bridge. He was reunited with Edith, and on 10 April he was found to be fighting fit again. Then, to Edith's despair, he was posted back to Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, and the 13th Lancashire Fusiliers.

The War Office needed every man it could get. The Germans had launched their long-expected
Spring Offensive
on 21 March, using all the vast manpower that had been freed from the Eastern Front when the Bolsheviks pulled Russia out of the war. For Germany this was a last gamble before Americans could arrive in their millions. For a while it seemed a wildly successful throw of the dice.

Having withdrawn from the Somme in 1917, the Germans now swept over the British line. Tolkien's comrades-in-arms in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers were among those pushed back with great loss by the relentless tide, finding themselves on 26 March – after a sixteen-mile retreat – defending the old Somme front line where it had stood at the very beginning of the great 1916 battle. And this was only the first of five grand assaults by Germany.

Whatever the War Office had in mind for Tolkien, he was stationed initially at
Penkridge Camp
, an outlying section of Rugeley Camp on a ridge east of the Sher Brook, where he had stayed for a while during training for France. The barrenness of the heath was here relieved by a plantation of trees, and in the spring the Chase was more bearable than it had been when he had first arrived in late 1915. Later he was moved to Brocton Camp on the other side of the brook.

The return to Staffordshire ushered in a relatively happy interlude. Edith, baby John, and Jennie Grove found lodgings at a pleasant, rambling house called Gipsy Green, in Teddesley Hay, a manorial estate at the western foot of the Chase, and Tolkien was able to stay with them. He took out his sketchbooks again after a long break and drew the house, together with a tableau of scenes of family life. In his Gnomish lexicon, where he was outlining ideas for further ‘Lost Tales' during 1918, Gipsy Green followed Warwick, Great Haywood, Oxford, and Withernsea into the topography of the Lonely Isle, becoming
Fladweth Amrod
or Nomad's Green, ‘a place in
Tol Erethrin
where
Eriol
sojourned a while, nigh to
Tavrobel'.
In the summer, his shared labours with Christopher Wiseman over G. B. Smith's verse came to fruition when it was published by Erskine Macdonald as a small volume entitled
A Spring Harvest.

But the Gipsy Green idyll, such as it was, ended on 29 June, when Tolkien succumbed to
gastritis
at Brocton Camp. He was sent back to Brooklands in Hull; and as soon as he had recovered he might be posted to nearby Thirtle Bridge. Edith teased him, ‘I should think you ought never to feel tired again, for the amount of
Bed
you have had since you came back from France nearly two years ago is enormous.' Edith herself was still far from well, and she refused to move again. With Jennie she had lived in twenty-two different sets of lodgings in the two years since leaving Warwick in the spring of 1915 and had found it a ‘miserable wandering homeless sort of life'. Nor was it over: Tolkien himself looked back on the period from John's birth until 1925 as ‘a long nomadic series of arrivals at houses or lodgings that proved horrible – or worse: in some cases finding
none at all'. But Edith's exasperated decision now to stay at Gipsy Green was well timed: her husband spent the remainder of the war in hospital.

The gastritis that struck him down in 1918 may have saved his life, just as trench fever had saved it before. The cruel pushes on the Western Front had taken their toll. Men were becoming scarce and, despite the arrival of the Americans, the war was far from won. On Friday 26 July Tolkien received orders to embark for Boulogne the next day in order to join his battalion in France. Almost as soon as it was issued, the embarkation order was cancelled. The War Office pen-pusher responsible had failed to take note not only that Lieutenant Tolkien was laid up in hospital, but also that his service battalion had effectively ceased to exist.

Straight after their pursuit by the Germans across the old Somme battlefield, the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers had once more been moved to Ypres, in time to be on the receiving end of the second great German offensive of 1918, on 9 April. Despite heavy losses, they were sent unsuccessfully against Mount Kemmel on 25 April (a day after the Germans had destroyed the defending unit, G. B. Smith's old battalion, the 3rd Salford Pals). Then they had been moved far afield to unfamiliar territory in the French sector of the line, on the River Aisne, where on 27 May they bore the brunt of one of the fiercest bombardments of the war, and the Germans' third 1918 offensive. After two days of fighting and falling back, they turned at bay to cover the retreat of the rest of the 74th Brigade. Nothing was heard from them again. All that was left of the battalion Tolkien had fought in were sixteen men who had stayed in reserve (led by Major Rodney Beswick, who had been with him at Regina Trench). The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers were officially disbanded in August.

At Brooklands, Tolkien managed to pursue his mythological work, further developing Qenya and Goldogrin. He brushed up on his Spanish and Italian and – just as the Western Allies effectively joined the White Russians' war against the Bolsheviks
– he began to study Russian. But military duties of any sort were beyond Tolkien. Meals were followed by pain and stomach upsets. He lost two stone and regaining it proved to be a slow struggle. The Humber Garrison medical board decided he was out of danger and now needed little more than rest; but the War Office had ended the practice of sending officers home to convalesce, having decided that they made no efforts to get well.

He was saved from action for one last, crucial period. Germany's astonishing 1918 offensives had failed to decide the war in the Kaiser's favour. Now the tide had visibly turned as the Americans arrived in ever increasing force and Spanish influenza laid waste the half-starved German troops. The Somme, and more, had been swiftly regained by an armada of tanks. The Great War was hastening to an end.

Now Tolkien's obstinate ill health at last registered with the War Office, or rather its manpower needs were finally easing. Despite a barrage of red tape, the bonds of service were cut with surprising speed. At the start of October, Tolkien was allowed to ask Lloyd George's new Ministry of Labour if he could be employed outside the military. He was no longer attached to the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers.

On 11 October he was released from Brooklands and sent across the north of England to Blackpool, and the Savoy Convalescent Hospital.

He was well enough now to enjoy a formal Italian meal there with several officers, including two
carabinieri,
on Sunday 13 October, and the next day a medical board found him unfit for any military duty for six months – but fit for a desk job. He was discharged from the hospital there and then.

The Great War ended on 11 November, with scenes of jubilation on the streets of Britain and ‘
unwonted silence
' in No Man's Land. Tolkien, who would remain a soldier of the British Army until he was demobilized, asked after Armistice Day to be stationed at Oxford ‘
for the purposes
of completing his education'. Like many who find themselves once more masters of their own
fate after a long remission, he had returned immediately to where he had last been a free man. His ambition before enlistment had been to begin an academic career, and nothing (certainly not his unpublished, unfinished, and painstaking mythology) had changed his mind. He cast about for work but found nothing, until his undergraduate tutor in Old Norse, William Craigie, one of the editors of the
Oxford English Dictionary,
offered to find him employment as an assistant lexicographer. From the viewpoint of the dictionary's editors, Tolkien would be an asset, but from the perspective of a jobless soldier facing a future that had never seemed less certain, this was a big break (and one he remembered with gratitude in his valedictory address forty-one years later at the end of his tenure as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature). An Old Edwardian in Oxford reported back to the school
Chronicle
some time later: ‘We rejoice to have Tolkien still among us – rumours of a dictionary beside which all previous dictionaries shall be as vocabularies reach us, and we go on our way shivering.'

By Christmas, Tolkien had found rooms at
50 St John Street
, up the road from the ‘Johnner', the digs he had shared with Colin Cullis, and he moved in with Edith, John, and Jennie Grove. Students were flooding back from the armed forces, although they would not return to their pre-war numbers for a while and as yet, in the words of one historian, ‘
were acutely aware
of stepping into the shoes of dead men'. Soon Tolkien was earning extra pennies by giving tuition, chiefly to women students, and re-reading Chaucer and
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
At Exeter College, Tolkien's old friend T. W. Earp had (in the words of Robert Graves) ‘
set himself the task
of keeping the Oxford tradition alive through the dead years', preserving the minute-books of many undergraduateless societies, which were now re-formed. The Essay Club became the first public audience for Tolkien's mythology when he read ‘
The Fall of Gondolin
'.

In the real world it was ‘the enemy' that had fallen: the empires of Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey. But the old world had gone too, leaving the new one with a legacy of
uncertainty, cruelty, and suffering. Millions had died, and very few were untouched by bereavement. Many of the young men who had stood beside Tolkien in those black-and-white photographs of rugby teams or dining clubs at King Edward's School and Exeter College were gone.
^*
From Tolkien's school, 243 died; from his college, 141. From Oxford University as a whole, nearly one in five servicemen was killed, considerably more than the national average because so many had been junior officers.

Even
Colin Cullis
did not long survive the war in which he had been judged physically unfit to serve: pneumonia, brought on by the influenza epidemic, claimed his life just after Tolkien was demobbed. From King Edward's, Tolkien's cousin Thomas Ewart Mitton, five years his junior and a fellow poet, had been killed in an accident while serving as a signaller at Ypres. Of the broad Birmingham TCBS, Ralph Payton had died on the Somme in 1916 and the wise-cracking ‘Tea-Cake' Barnsley, having recovered from shell shock, had been killed in action with the Coldstream Guards near Ypres in 1917. Rob Gilson was gone. The loss of so many friends remained, in the words of Tolkien's children, ‘a lifelong sadness'. It was for G. B. Smith that Tolkien mourned most deeply; the two had understood each other's social background and maternal upbringing; they had shared a school, a university, a regiment, and a bloody page of history; they had been akin in their reverence for poetry and the imagination, and had spurred each other into creative flight.

The war also weakened the bond between the Great Twin Brethren. Back in 1916, as Tolkien lay in the Birmingham University Hospital, Christopher Wiseman had looked forward to days of peace when he might go to Oxford and study law at Christ Church. He and Tolkien might share digs, he declared; ‘
perhaps in the ever-famous “Johnner”
'. After Smith's death, and that of
his own mother in August 1917, Wiseman had been abject, writing, ‘
We must contrive
to stick together somehow. I can't bear to be cut off from the seventh heaven I lived in my younger days.'

But while Tolkien was at Easington they had had another ‘
grand old quarrel
' of the sort that used to invigorate their walks to school up Harborne Road and Broad Street. Typically, it started from a small observation and became a battle royal between rationalism and mysticism. Tolkien found the most mundane human misunderstandings depressing, and blamed a ‘clash of backgrounds' arising from what he called ‘the decay of faith, the break up of that huge atmosphere or background of faith which was common to Europe in the Middle Ages'. Wiseman was scornful: ‘That huge atmosphere of magic; that ghastly atmosphere of superstition: that it is that has gone.' This was a religious dispute, with Tolkien speaking for the pre-schismatic Roman Catholic world, Wiseman for the Protestant Reformation and its legacy.